Names of Japan


The word Japan is an exonym, and is used by many languages. The Japanese names for Japan are Nippon and Nihon. They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本.
Before Nihon came into official use, Japan was known in China as Wa or Wakoku. The name was first used during the third-century Three Kingdoms period, and can be translated as "dwarf" or "submissive". Japanese scribes found fault with its offensive connotation, and in the native name for Japan, Yamato, the character for Wa was replaced with the homophone . Wa was often combined with to form the name, which is read as Yamato. The earliest record of appears in the Chinese Old Book of Tang, which notes the change in 703 when Japanese envoys requested that its name be changed. It is believed that the name change within Japan itself took place sometime between 665 and 703. During the Heian period, was gradually replaced by, which was first pronounced with the Chinese reading Nippon and later as Nihon, reflecting shifts in phonology in Early Modern Japanese.

History

Both Nippon and Nihon literally mean "the sun's origin", that is, where the sun originates, and are often translated as the Land of the Rising Sun. This nomenclature comes from Imperial correspondence with the Chinese Sui Dynasty and refers to Japan's eastern position relative to China. Before Nihon came into official use, Japan was known as or. Wa was a name early China used to refer to an ethnic group living in Japan around the time of the Three Kingdoms Period.
Although the etymological origins of "Wa" remain uncertain, Chinese historical texts recorded an ancient people residing in the Japanese archipelago, named something like *ˀWâ or *ˀWər 倭. Carr surveys prevalent proposals for Wa's etymology ranging from feasible to shameful, and summarizes interpretations for *ˀWâ "Japanese" into variations on two etymologies: "behaviorally 'submissive' or physically 'short'." The first "submissive; obedient" explanation began with the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. It defines 倭 as shùnmào 順皃 "obedient/submissive/docile appearance", graphically explains the "person; human" radical 亻 with a wěi 委 "bent" phonetic, and quotes the above Shijing poem. "Conceivably, when Chinese first met Japanese," Carr suggests "they transcribed Wa as *ˀWâ 'bent back' signifying 'compliant' bowing/obeisance. Bowing is noted in early historical references to Japan." Examples include "Respect is shown by squatting", and "they either squat or kneel, with both hands on the ground. This is the way they show respect.". Koji Nakayama interprets wēi 逶 "winding" as "very far away" and euphemistically translates Wō 倭 as "separated from the continent." The second etymology of wō 倭 meaning "dwarf, pygmy" has possible cognates in ǎi 矮 "low, short ", wō 踒 "strain; sprain; bent legs", and wò 臥 "lie down; crouch; sit ". Early Chinese dynastic histories refer to a Zhūrúguó 侏儒國 "pygmy/dwarf country" located south of Japan, associated with possibly Okinawa Island or the Ryukyu Islands. Carr cites the historical precedence of construing Wa as "submissive people" and the "Country of Dwarfs" legend as evidence that the "little people" etymology was a secondary development.
Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote Wa or Yamato "Japan" with the Chinese character 倭 until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it due to its offensive connotation, replacing it with 和 "harmony, peace, balance". Retroactively, this character was adopted in Japan to refer to the country itself, often combined with the character 大, so as to write the name as Yamato . However, the pronunciation Yamato cannot be formed from the sounds of its constituent characters; it refers to a place in Japan and is speculated to originally mean "Mountain Gate". Such words which use certain kanji to name a certain Japanese word solely for the purpose of representing the word's meaning regardless of the given kanji's on'yomi or kun'yomi, a.k.a. jukujikun, is not uncommon in Japanese. Other original names in Chinese texts include Yamatai country, where a Queen Himiko lived. When hi no moto, the indigenous Japanese way of saying "sun's origin", was written in kanji, it was given the characters 日本. In time, these characters began to be read using Sino-Japanese readings, first Nippon and later Nihon, although the two names are interchangeable to this day.
Nippon appeared in history only at the end of the 7th century. The Old Book of Tang, one of the Twenty-Four Histories, stated that the Japanese envoy disliked his country's name Woguo , and changed it to Nippon , or "Origin of the Sun". Another 8th-century chronicle, True Meaning of Shiji, however, states that the Chinese Empress Wu Zetian ordered a Japanese envoy to change the country's name to Nippon. It has been suggested that the name change in Japan may have taken place sometime between 665 and 703, and Wu Zetian then acceded to the name change in China following a request from a delegation from Japan in 703. The sun plays an important role in Japanese mythology and religion as the emperor is said to be the direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu and the legitimacy of the ruling house rested on this divine appointment and descent from the chief deity of the predominant Shinto religion. The name of the country reflects this central importance of the sun. The association of the country with the sun was indicated in a letter sent in 607 and recorded in the official history of the Sui dynasty. Prince Shōtoku, the Regent of Japan, sent a mission to China with a letter in which he called himself "the Son of Heaven of the Land where the Sun rises". The message said: "The Son of Heaven, in the land of the rising sun, sends this letter to the Son of Heaven of the land, where the sun sets, and wishes him well".
The English word for Japan came to the West from early trade routes. The early Mandarin Chinese or possibly Wu Chinese word for Japan was recorded by Marco Polo as Cipangu. In modern Toisanese, 日本 is pronounced as ], which sounds nearly identical to Nippon. The Malay and Indonesian words Jepang, Jipang, and Jepun were borrowed from non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and this Malay word was encountered by Portuguese traders in Malacca in the 16th century. It is thought the Portuguese traders were the first to bring the word to Europe. It was first recorded in English in 1577 spelled Giapan.
In English, the modern official title of the country is simply "Japan", one of the few nation-states to have no "long form" name. The official Japanese-language name is Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally "State of Japan". From the Meiji Restoration until the end of World War II, the full title of Japan was the "Empire of Greater Japan". A more poetic rendering of the name of Japan during this period was "Empire of the Sun." The official name of the nation was changed after the adoption of the post-war constitution; the title "State of Japan" is sometimes used as a colloquial modern-day equivalent. As an adjective, the term "Dai-Nippon" remains popular with Japanese governmental, commercial, or social organizations whose reach extend beyond Japan's geographic borders.
Though Nippon or Nihon are still by far the most popular names for Japan from within the country, recently the foreign words Japan and even Jipangu have been used in Japanese mostly for the purpose of foreign branding.

Historical

arrived in Japan at the end of the 16th century. In the course of learning Japanese, they created several grammars and dictionaries of Middle Japanese. The 1603–1604 dictionary Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam contains two entries for Japan: nifon and iippon.
The title of the dictionary illustrates that the Portuguese word for Japan was by that time Iapam.

Nifon

Historically, Japanese has undergone a number of phonological changes. Originally *, this weakened into and eventually became the modern. Modern is still pronounced when followed by.
Middle Japanese nifon becomes Modern Japanese nihon via regular phonological changes.

Jippon

Before modern styles of romanization, the Portuguese devised their own. In it, is written as either ii or ji. In modern Hepburn style, iippon would be rendered as Jippon. There are no historical phonological changes to take into account here.
Etymologically, Jippon is similar to Nippon in that it is an alternative reading of 日本. The initial character 日 may also be read as or. Compounded with , this regularly becomes Jippon.
Unlike the Nihon/Nippon doublet, there is no evidence for a *Jihon.

Nihon and Nippon

The Japanese name for Japan, 日本, can be pronounced either Nihon or Nippon. Both readings come from the on'yomi.

Meaning

日 means "sun" or "day"; 本 means "base" or "origin". The compound means "origin of the sun" or "where the sun rises" ; it is a source for the popular Western description of Japan as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
Nichi, in compounds, often loses the final chi and creates a slight pause between the first and second syllables of the compound. When romanised, this pause is represented by a doubling of the first consonant of the second syllable; thus nichi 日 plus kō 光 is written and pronounced nikkō, meaning sunlight.

History and evolution

Japanese, as a reintroduction of this independent pronunciation of 本 into the compound. This must have taken place during the Edo period, after another sound change occurred which would have resulted in this form becoming Niwon and later Nion.
Several attempts to decidedly determine an official reading were rejected by the Japanese government, which declared both to be correct.

Modern conventions

While both pronunciations are correct, Nippon is frequently preferred for official purposes, including money, stamps, and international sporting events, as well as the Nippon-koku, literally the "State of Japan".
Other than this, there seem to be no fixed rules for choosing one pronunciation over the other, but in some cases, one form is simply more common. For example, Japanese-speakers generally call their language Nihongo; Nippongo, while possible,
is rarely used. In other cases, uses are variable. The name for the Bank of Japan, for example, is given as NIPPON GINKO on banknotes but is often referred to, such as in the media, as Nihon Ginkō.
Nippon is the form that is used usually or exclusively in the following constructions:
Nihon is used always or most often in the following constructions:
In 2016, element 113 on the periodic table was named nihonium to honor its discovery in 2004 by Japanese scientists at RIKEN. That is unrelated to "nipponium," a defunct synonym for the element rhenium.

Jipangu

As mentioned above, the English word Japan has a circuitous derivation; but linguists believe it derives in part from the Portuguese recording of the early Mandarin Chinese or Wu Chinese word for Japan: Cipan, which is rendered in pinyin as Rìběn, and literally translates to "sun origin". Guó is Chinese for "realm" or "kingdom", so it could alternatively be rendered as Cipan-guo. The word was likely introduced to Portuguese through the Malay Jipang.
Cipangu was first mentioned in Europe in the accounts of Marco Polo. It appears for the first time on a European map with the Fra Mauro map in 1457, although it appears much earlier on Chinese and Korean maps such as the Gangnido. Following the accounts of Marco Polo, Cipangu was thought to be fabulously rich in silver and gold, which in Medieval times was largely correct, owing to the volcanism of the islands and the possibility to access precious ores without resorting to deep-mining technologies.
The Dutch name, Japan, may be derived from the southern Chinese pronunciation of 日本, Yatbun or Yatpun. The Dutch J is generally pronounced Y, hence Ja-Pan.
The modern Shanghainese pronunciation of Japan is Zeppen. In modern Japanese, Cipangu is transliterated as チパング which in turn can be transliterated into English as Chipangu, Jipangu, Zipangu, Jipang, or Zipang. Jipangu as an obfuscated name for Japan has recently come into vogue for Japanese films, anime, video games, etc.

Other names

Classical

These names were invented after the introduction of Chinese into the language, and they show up in historical texts for prehistoric legendary dates and also in names of gods and Japanese emperors:
The katakana transcription ジャパン of the English word Japan is sometimes encountered in Japanese, for example in the names of organizations seeking to project an international image. Examples include ジャパンネット銀行 , ジャパンカップ , ワイヤレスジャパン , etc.
Dōngyáng and Dōngyíng – both literally, "Eastern Ocean" – are Chinese terms sometimes used to refer to Japan exotically when contrasting it with other countries or regions in eastern Eurasia; however, these same terms may also be used to refer to all of East Asia when contrasting "the East" with "the West". The first term, Dōngyáng, has been considered to be a pejorative term when used to mean "Japan", while the second, Dōngyíng, has remained a positive poetic name. They can be contrasted with Nányáng, which refers to Southeast Asia, and Xīyáng, which refers to the Western world. In Japanese and Korean, the Chinese word for "Eastern Ocean" is used only to refer to the Far East in general, and it is not used in the more specific Chinese sense of "Japan".
In China, Japan is called Rìběn, which is the Mandarin pronunciation for the characters 日本. The Cantonese pronunciation is Yahtbún, the Shanghainese pronunciation is Zeppen, and the Hokkien pronunciation is Ji̍tpún / Li̍t-pún. This has influenced the Malay name for Japan, Jepun, and the Thai word Yipun. The terms Jepang and Jipang, ultimately derived from Chinese, were previously used in both Malay and Indonesian, but are today confined primarily to the Indonesian language. The Japanese introduced Nippon and Dai Nippon into Indonesia during the Japanese Occupation but the native Jepang remains more common. In Korean, Japan is called Ilbon, which is the Korean pronunciation of the Sino-Korean name, and in Sino-Vietnamese, Japan is called Nhật Bản. In Mongolian, Japan is called Yapon.
Ue-kok is recorded for older Hokkien speakers. In the past, Korea also used 倭國, pronounced Waeguk.

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